


levity; or how james wilson got his lunch back

by phinnia



Category: House, M.D. - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-20
Updated: 2007-10-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 09:41:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/159517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phinnia/pseuds/phinnia





	levity; or how james wilson got his lunch back

House maintained that it was all his fault, of course. When pressed, he claimed it was because Wilson was too nice to the nurses.

It began, as most things tend to, on an ordinary Thursday. Wilson, like Arthur Dent, had never gotten the hang of Thursdays, but this one was so far going more or less his way: he hadn't had to tell anyone they were dying, which was always a bonus for someone in his line of work, and House hadn't barged into his office, paged him without reason or stolen anything - yet he hadn't been too quiet, either, which would have been grounds for even more suspicion: the man was honestly busy giving his new fellowship applicants the runaround instead, which suited Wilson just fine. He was finishing up rounds on the peds floor (cute kids, doing well for a change, responding to treatment) and was about to go to lunch when he heard bloodcurdling screams coming from one of the exam rooms.

He poked his head in the door. "Everything okay?"

"Just fine - doctor." One of the new batch of nurses - Lisa? Laura? Lanette? he couldn't see her nametag. Curly red hair, cute ass, anyway - answered him through gritted teeth. She and another nurse were trying to hold a child still on the exam table.

The other nurse - tall, blonde, hair in a fancy braid, wearing a coat with Winnie-the-Pooh on it - he really had to get better about learning _names_ \- yelped, jumping back from the table, and the first one had to throw herself bodily over the child to keep him from escaping. "He bit me!"

Wilson cleared his throat. "Can I ... you know, give a hand or something?"

"Help me hold him down. Jenny, go next door and get Maria to check that out, and send someone else in, please? We need a few more hands here." She lost her grip and the child wiggled free.

By some miracle Wilson managed to intercept him and attempted to drag him back to the table. "Easy, big guy, easy." he muttered, narrowly avoiding a kick to the shins. He decided that maybe sitting in the chair with him might be slightly easier - especially since the boy had already shoved them both into one of the exam room's chairs anyway.

"He's autistic." The nurse gasped, out of breath, as she grabbed the needle off the table. "They can't put a central line in him for the chemo - he just rips it right out, he's tactually sensitive - so -"

"Needle sticks." He gritted his teeth and tried to hold the child still, wrapping both arms and one foot around him in an attempt to restrain him a little better.

"Exactly." She tapped the air bubbles out of the syringe, careful to keep it out of the child's line of sight. "You're good at this."

"Brothers." Wilson replied breathlessly, trying to get hold of the boy's hand, which had broken free. In the process the boy turned, squirming, and saw the needle, which made him scream louder (Wilson had previously thought that 'louder' wasn't possible, a statement he was now prepared to go back on). The child flailed around like a prizewinning salmon, and it was all Wilson could do to keep him even remotely still.

The nurse swept in, attempting to inject the drug quickly -

And the child grabbed the syringe and jammed it into Wilson's bicep, pushing the plunger down before either of them could move.

*

Leave it to House, of course, to find this _funny_. "The kid shot you?"

"Apparently he's been paying more attention than anyone thought during the treatments." Wilson replied sourly, rubbing his sore arm. "His mother was thrilled - well, sort of - you know these kids, they're stuck in their own little world most of the time, so really any progress is great ... yeah, the kid injected me."

"'Shot you' sounds so much cooler."

"I'm not surprised you'd find amusement in this. It's someone else's misfortune, after all."

"Oh come on, Jimmy, it's _funny_. What was it he shot you with?"

"Even worse. He's in Kepler's new clinical trial - so I had to jump through half a million hoops and kiss another half dozen asses to get them to overnight some more of their precious experimental baby." He slid his tray further along and rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand, trying to stave off the incipient stress headache. "I _was_ having a pretty good day, but talking to him leaves me with this uncontrollable urge to break something."

"Start with his nose and work your way down. Bastard could use it." House chuckled, breezing past the checkout stand and snagging Wilson's pudding cup on the way by. "He's paying."

Wilson tossed a handful of bills at the cashier and darted through the crowd after his stolen dessert. "Give me that. I _earned_ that pudding cup sitting on hold with Kepler's monkeys."

"Ah-ah-ah-"

"Damnit, House-"

"Just keeping you in fighting shape." House grinned, his long arms holding the pudding cup out of Wilson's reach with ease. "Your hips don't need the calories, you know."

Wilson stretched forward on his toes, grasping at empty air-

And the pudding cup snapped into his hands like it was on a rubber band.

House blinked, surprised. "What the hell?"

"Get your own." Wilson wrenched it open and licked the pudding off the inside of the lid, deciding petulantly that he was going to eat his goddamn dessert _first_ before House managed to get hold of it again and the ghost of his grandmother that wouldn't stop telling him how much he was spoiling his dinner could just shut up, god rest her soul.

"Seriously, how the hell did you do that?"

"You're not getting it back. There's lots of them in the fridge over there, see? Get your own."

Another pudding cup flew across the room and landed in Wilson's hand.

This time it startled him enough to make him stop eating. Everyone else in the cafeteria seemed to be having the same problem, apparently, because the room was suddenly silent as the grave.

House stared at Wilson with the full force of his intense blue eyes, snatching the second pudding cup away. " _Awesome._ Now _that_ is what I call a side effect."

*

"House."

"Cuddy."

"Clinic."

"Patient."

"No."

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Since lunch." House inclined his head toward Wilson, who had the good grace to look sheepish and nod, anyway.

She always jumped to the worst conclusions. He was starting to feel kind of hurt about it, or would if he decided to give a damn, anyway. Which he might, just to spite her. "You poisoned Wilson to get out of clinic duty?"

"I didn't poison him." Damn her, she'd cut off his momentum and now he had to _explain_ and if there was one thing that House hated more than anything, even more than clinic duty, it was having to explain things that he didn't totally understand himself. "One of his patients shot him."

"Injected." Wilson murmured.

"Shot sounds so much cooler! You'll get more babes that way." He thought a moment about that and repressed a wince. "Okay, maybe we should say injected. Anyway, one of his patients injected him with an experimental drug and now he's got superpowers. Don't you read comic books? That's how it always goes."

He tried to dodge again, but she was on to him, and not even in the happy fun way, either. "That is the _worst_ excuse I have ever heard, and with you, that's saying something. How much is he paying you?" This to Wilson, who was doing that embarrassed turtle thing he did sometimes. "Or is it paying you back? I mean, really-"

"Like I would ever pay Wilson back." House leapt to defend what was left of his honor - or something.

"What?" Wilson had managed to shave a few seconds off his previous transition time from 'embarrassed schoolboy' to 'righteous indignation' - and the previous total was pretty damn impressive. "House-"

"Oh, it's not like I mean it, it's only _Cuddy_."

"Yes, you're only lying to your _boss_." She had that dangerous sparkle in her eyes. The last time he'd seen that was just before she'd revoked his lab privileges and put him on clinic duty until half past Nevuary and that wasn't an experience he cared to repeat. "Not a big _deal_ or anything."

"Just ... do your thing!" House waved his hands frantically in the air. "You know, mumbo jumbo, like you did before, upstairs!"

"I don't know what I _did!_ " Wilson threw his hands toward the sky in supplication. "All I did was tell you that the pudding was in the fridge up there and-"

There was a faraway shriek. Glass shattered in the nearby stairwell, and another pudding cup floated through the remains of the tiny window and landed in Wilson's outstretched hand.

House grinned, shaking his head in slow delight. "Seriously. Fucking. Awesome."

Cuddy stared at it. Then she stared at Wilson.

Wilson handed it to her with a slight cough. His expression was a strange mixture of pride, fascination and embarassment. "Um. For you."

"Thanks." Cuddy held it between two fingers of one hand and poked at it with the index finger of the other. "I think."

"Hey, Cuddy, I know how you girls are about your weight, so if you're not going to eat that, I'll-"

"I think I'll be just _fine_ , House." she hissed, still staring at the pudding cup in her hand. "Just need a spoon-"

Wilson cleared his throat. "Uh, here." Something floated gracefully through the broken window and landed in the palm of his hand.

A plastic spoon, of course.

*

Wilson kept forgetting how fast House could walk when he was high on adrenalin and medical mysteries - it was all he could do to keep up. "Where are we going?"

"I can't tell you." House dribbled his oversized tennis ball on the floor as he walked. He had made a big deal out of stopping to pick it up; Wilson assumed he'd find out why later.

"What?"

House sighed a heavy, weary sigh that held the weight of the world - or at least the slow - in it. "In case you haven't noticed, you're a bit of a loose cannon right now."

"What?"

"Given what happened during our little discussion with Elvira back there, if I tell you where we're going there's a very real chance that your freaky spidey-sense will decide that the mountain needs to come to Wilson instead of the other way around, and if I break any more diagnostic equipment this year Cuddy's going to chain me to her bed and sell me into sexual slavery. Or maybe she won't." House jabbed the elevator button with the tip of his cane. "I always forget which one of those I'm supposed to be scared of. Anyway, bad things happen, Dark Mistress angry, you know the prophecies." A thoughtful look flickered across his features. "Maybe I should blindfold you."

"You won't even pay for your own lunch and you expect me to get kinky? Some boyfriend you are."

"You know you're the only one for me, baby, those other boys mean nothing."

"You're all talk. I've seen the way you look at Chase. My mother warned me about you."

"I was just helping him get something out of his eye, it wasn't what it looked like, I swear."

*

As it turned out they were headed to the MRI machine. A cold shiver crept up Wilson's spine as he tried to think reassuringly stable thoughts about how good thousand-pound pieces of equipment stayed on the floor where they belonged and how much he didn't want to be in the world's first man/MRI psychic vehicular-type homicide. Pudding cups and spoons were one thing, but this had the potential to turn ugly very, very fast.

"Really I'd think all you need to do is be agonizingly specific." House's voice crackled over the intercom. "It's just a theory, of course, I'm not the one with the awesome superpower, but my theories do have a tendency to be correct most of the time."

The smugness might have been attractive, but there were times when it was obnoxious as hell. "What?"

"You like that word today, don't you? More so than usual. You were freaking out about property damage, probably had visions of MRI machines dancing in your head -"

"Clement Moore you're not, House, get to the point." How did he do that? It was positively eerie.

"Touchy. But it stands to reason - all you have to do is be annoyingly specific. You want to get pudding, but you want to take the stairs. You want to open doors on the way. You have to tell it exactly what to do or it won't behave and take the easy way out."

"So treat it like I do you then."

"Next time I hope the kid stabs Chase or something. He wouldn't be such a smartass about it." House mused. "Okay, try this. The door to the control room is open; fetch the tennis ball, Jimmy. Remember, you have to visualize every step in the process."

"How do you know about this stuff?"

"You remember Cameron's little fling with self-improvement? She had this new age crap on a CD, one of those meditation ones with rain and loons or some idiotic thing and some woman droning on about chakras. I think she was trying to brainwash me with sweetness and light while I was busy napping."

"Right." Wilson drew a shaky breath and let it out slowly, imagining the red and grey swirls of the familiar tennis ball rising slowly off the table. The MRI machine clicked and thumped around him, taking readings; he squeezed his eyes shut and tried to concentrate. Up off the console, across the room, out the door, across the end of the lab, past the machines, down into the tube -

The ball landed, a solid weight on his chest, and he let out the breath he'd been holding with an explosive sigh.

"See? I was right." House's glee was palpable even through the crummy speakers. "So fucking awesome. Come on, let's go look at these back downstairs."

Wilson slid out of the tube and followed House back to the elevator. "You were right. It's kind of like those little handheld pinball things, you know the ones." He glanced up at the elevator display, saw they were both on eight, and decided to try something - all in the name of science, of course.

Seconds later, the elevator doors opened, revealing a cab full of startled patrons that turned confused as they discovered their car had been suddenly hijacked to the basement.

"So fucking awesome. Move, people, superhero coming through." House grinned and punched Wilson on the shoulder.

Wilson couldn't help but smile himself. "You know what the best part of this is though? Seriously?"

"What?"

"This is _totally_ going to fuck up Kepler's clinical trial."


End file.
